Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
	Difference: 200 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Geforce GTX 690 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon R9 M290X in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 230912 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 will be a lot (about 244%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M290X. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 166240 (244%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 is a lot (approximately 115%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 M290X, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31360 (115%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.